Topical conversations with industry experts bring AAA pedagogy alive

Professor Alberto Posso, course-coordinator of ‘Understanding the business environment’, conducts meaningful, relevant conversations with industry experts aligned to weekly topics to build contextual understanding of business sectors and career options.

Background

The Context

The foundation level course ‘Understanding the business environment’ was re-designed in 2022 as part of the first-year block built for the new Bachelor of Business. Professor Alberto Posso took the opportunity to introduce more meaningful, relevant learning experiences aligned to real-world contexts in the course and found this approach boosted participation and engagement in recorded lectorials and in-person tutorials.

Active, Applied and Authentic (AAA) cirriculum design

Active

Students are active partners in their learning and learning activities are experiential and problem-based.

Applied

RMIT Capabilities & Industry-partnered learning (IPL) is embedded in all programs.

Authentic

Authentic Outcomes and Relevant, practical assessment.

Topic planning: Professor Posso works closely with course-coordinators of the foundation courses in the first-year block to plot out the topics each course will cover to ensure that students gain the foundational knowledge to support their choice of major(s) in the Bachelor of Business, without experiencing overlapping content.

Industry lens: Weekly topics are introduced through interviews Professor Posso conducts with leaders from key organisations such as the United Nations, Oxfam and the World Bank, where he discusses the latest industry developments, opportunities or challenges framed by each topic. Students are required to watch the recorded interviews before class and to complete an interactive exercise (using H5P) where they reflect on the topic and review what was covered in the interview. The topic is further explored in tutorials through peer to peer and group discussions lead by Professor Posso.

Assessment: Many students undertaking a business degree do not understand how topics might be relevant to their future (as they are often not sure what their future career might look like!). With this in mind, Professor Posso designs course assessments to replicate tasks students might encounter in their first year of work in the key business areas of economics, finance, law or marketing.

Assignment 1: Students undertake a job interview (using Interview 360) for an entry level business assistant job - with the first 3 questions based on an interview for an authentic economics job.
Assignment 2: Students are told they have got the ‘job‘ and receive a video briefing from their ‘manager’ to complete their first task. This requires conducting the background research for a micro-economics report and creating supporting graphs.
Assignment 3: This builds on assignment 2 and switches the focus to macro-economics tasks. The ‘manager’ provides feedback on assignment 2 and asks them to present their findings at a ‘conference‘. Students record their presentation as if they were at an authentic conference and submit online.

What technologies, spaces and foundational components supported this Snapshot?

Note that links require an RMIT staff login.

Tools, teachnology and spaces

A range of business technologies and tools are used to drive engagement and authenticity in this course and enable and support application of AAA Pedagogy:

Career Centre

Interview 360 – Used for practicing interview techniques and to deliver assignment 1

Tools

Canvas Studio – for recording the weekly interviews with industry experts
H5P – used to create interactive weekly quizzes based on the weekly topic interview

Digital learning spaces

Canvas LMS
Teams Meetings

Return to Next in Teaching

19 April 2024

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